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In-service training for health professionals to improve care of seriously ill newborns and children in low-income countries

What question was the review asking?

This is the first update of the original Cochrane review, whose objective was to find out whether additional emergency care training programmes can improve the ability of health workers in poor countries to care for seriously ill newborns and children admitted to hospitals. Researchers at The Cochrane Collaboration searched for all studies that could answer this question and found two relevant studies.

What are the key messages?

The review authors suggest that giving health professionals in poor countries additional training in emergency care probably improves their ability to care for seriously ill newborns. We need additional high-quality studies, including studies in which health professionals are trained to care for seriously ill older children.

Background: training health professionals to care for seriously ill babies and children

In poor countries, many babies and children with serious illnesses die even though they have been cared for in hospitals. One reason for this may be that health workers in these countries often are not properly trained to offer the care that these children need.

In poor countries, children often become seriously ill because of conditions such as pneumonia, meningitis and diarrhoea, and may need emergency care. For newborn babies, the most common reason for emergency care is too little oxygen to the baby during birth. If this goes on for too long, the person delivering the baby has to help the baby breathe, and sometimes has to get the baby’s heart rate back to normal. This is called neonatal resuscitation.

Neonatal resuscitation is a skilled task, and the health worker needs proper training. As babies need to be resuscitated quickly, the health worker needs to know how to prepare for this before the baby is born. For instance, he or she needs to know how to prepare the room and proper equipment. Health workers in poor countries often do not have these skills, and these babies are likely to die. Babies can also be harmed if the health worker does not resuscitate the baby correctly.

Several training programmes have been developed to teach health workers how to give emergency care to seriously ill babies and children. But most of these have been developed and tested in wealthy countries, and we don’t know whether they would work in poor countries.

What happens when health professionals in poor countries are given extra training?

The review authors found two relevant studies. These studies compared the practices of health professionals who had been given extra training in the care of newborns with the practices of health professionals who did not receive extra training.

In the first study, nurses at a maternity hospital in Kenya completed a one-day training course on how to resuscitate newborn babies. This course was adapted from the UK Resuscitation Council, and it included lectures and practical training. The study suggests that after these training courses:

• health professionals are probably more likely to resuscitate newborn babies correctly (moderate certainty of the evidence); and

• newborn babies may be less likely to die while being resuscitated (low certainty of the evidence).

In the second study, doctors, nurses and midwives in five Sri Lankan hospitals were given a four-day training course on how to prepare for and provide care for newborns. This course was adapted from the World Health Organization (WHO) Training Modules on Essential Newborn Care and Breastfeeding, and included lectures, demonstrations, hands-on training and small group discussions. This study suggests that after these training courses:

• health professionals probably are more likely to be well prepared to resuscitate newborn babies (moderate certainty of the evidence).

Unfortunately, the two studies followed up with health professionals for only two to three months after they received training. We therefore don’t know if the benefits of the training courses lasted over time.

The review authors found no studies that looked at the effects of training programmes on the care of older children.

How up-to-date is this review?

Review authors searched for studies that had been published up to February 2015.

A variety of in-service emergency care training courses are currently being promoted as a strategy to improve the quality of care provided to seriously ill newborns and children in low-income countries. Most courses have been developed in high-income countries. However, whether these courses improve the ability of health professionals to provide appropriate care in low-income countries remains unclear. This is the first update of the original review.

Objectives:

To assess the effects of in-service emergency care training on health professionals' treatment of seriously ill newborns and children in low-income countries.

Search strategy:

For this update, we searched the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, part of The Cochrane Library (www.cochranelibrary.com); MEDLINE, Ovid SP; EMBASE, Ovid SP; the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), part of The Cochrane Library (www.cochranelibrary.com) (including the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) Group Specialised Register); Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index, Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Knowledge/Science and eight other databases. We performed database searches in February 2015. We also searched clinical trial registries, websites of relevant organisations and reference lists of related reviews. We applied no date, language or publication status restrictions when conducting the searches.

Selection criteria:

Randomised trials, non-randomised trials, controlled before and after studies and interrupted-time-series studies that compared the effects of in-service emergency care training versus usual care were eligible for inclusion. We included only hospital-based studies and excluded community-based studies. Two review authors independently screened and selected studies for inclusion.

Data collection and analysis:

Two review authors independently extracted data and assessed studyrisk of bias and confidence in effect estimates (certainty of evidence) for each outcome using GRADE (Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development and Evaluation). We described results and presented them in GRADE tables.